When it comes to getting featured in the media, you can be proactive, reactive, or a combination of both.
Proactive PR is where you develop your story or pitch and then approach a journalist directly, explaining succinctly why your story is a good fit for their audience. Whether you pitch your story to one or many journalists, each approach needs to be well-researched and personalised.
Reactive PR is when a journalist puts a call out for certain stories, case studies, examples or opinions for a specific piece they are working on. There are a variety of ways journalists and influencers do this and the most accessible is #journorequest on Twitter.
Journalists will post the details of what they’re looking for and include #journorequest in the tweet so that they are easily searchable. It’s free to search #journorequest and then you either tweet them back to explain how you might be able to help with what they’re looking for or email them with the same information. Again, short and succinct is the way to go. Have a look when you get chance, there are often some corkers on there! And some great ones too.
Tools to help with reactive PR
There are some tools that can help with #journorequest. Hootsuite is a brilliant app to use which allows you to monitor certain hashtags, as well as schedule your social media posts – so a win-win! You can set it up to show all tweets with the hashtag #journorequest in one ‘stream’ (like a list) and check back as often as you life to see what requests are on there. Get your media bio ready so that you can quickly reply to the #journoreqest, tweet why you’re the perfect candidate or ask for more info, and then send a pitch which makes it clear how you can help with the piece.
If you have some budget to spend then there are other (paid for) services you can use to access requests from journalists or influencers, many of which are categorised for you so that you will only see relevant requests such as business and finance, women’s interest, property and so on. These include Response Source, Press Plugs, JournoLink and SourceBottle.
